Sheet metal has heretofore been employed as a material from which to fabricate caskets. A casket includes a shell to which is pivoted one or two caps or lids. The casket shell includes a pair of side walls or panels, a pair of end walls or panels and a bottom wall or panel. The panels are of course stamped from sheet metal. The stampings from which the shell is constructed may include decorative curves or the like or they may be simply planar in shape. The panels are interconnected along adjacent edges. The particular metal from which the casket is fabricated generally determines the means of mechanically joining the panels, e.g. brazing, soldering or welding.
Sheet metal caskets include a shell having a ledge around the periphery of an upper edge of the shell. A locking mechanism spans the length of the ledge therein. One type of locking mechanism employed is known as a wedge bar type locking mechanism, an example of which is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,503,439 assigned to the assignee of the present invention and hereby incorporated by reference herein as if fully set forth in its entirety. In this type of locking mechanism, an elongated bar includes a series of catches which, when the bar is translated in a first direction, engage with pulldown fasteners secured to the lid to lock the lid to the shell, and when the bar is translated in a second direction, disengage from the pulldown fasteners to allow the lid to be opened. An Allen head screw is utilized to actuate the bar. The screw may reside in a tube secured to an end panel of the shell.
A sheet metal casket may also include a record tube, i.e. a rather short, small diameter tube into which is inserted a small rolled-up piece of paper including information, for example, identification of the deceased. Such a tube may also be secured to an end panel of the shell.
Since the above described tubes may not be formed as part of the end panel during stamping of the panel, the tube must be somehow mechanically attached to the panel. The tube may be brazed, soldered or welded to the end panel, or the tube may be crimped to the end panel.
Crimping the tube to the end panel is much more desirable than brazing, soldering or welding the tube to the end panel, since all of these steps generate environmentally undesirable fumes and are labor intensive requiring a separate non-automatable hand operation. Further, some metals from which sheet metal caskets are fabricated do not lend themselves well to brazing, soldering or welding. Still further, the brazed/soldered/welded joint ("heat fused joint") must be dressed down by hand to present an aesthetically pleasing joint between the tube and the panel, thus making the operation even more labor intensive. Lastly, since the brazing, soldering and welding, and subsequent dressing down operations, are performed by hand, repeatability is difficult to control.
Crimping the tube to the end panel is much more desirable than heat fusing the tube to the end panel since crimping does not include the attendant disadvantages discussed above and because the crimping step is readily automated.
When the casket shell is constructed from flat or planar end panels, i.e. end panels without curved or rounded side edges, the tube, whether for the locking mechanism or for the record tube, is and has heretofore been readily crimped to the flat panel and is therefore well known in the art. This known crimping step is performed by inserting an end of the tube through a hole formed in the flat end panel, sliding an O-ring onto the inserted end of the tube and against the surface of the end panel and crimping the tube around the O-ring and towards the end panel surface. Since the tube includes a surface which is perpendicular to the longitudinal axis of the tube for abutting against the end panel, the installed tube is perpendicular to the plane of the end panel once installed and thus parallel to the longitudinal axis of the casket.
However, in casket designs which include curved or rounded corners in the regions where the shell side panels and end panels transition towards one another, crimping has heretofore not been employable as a means of attaching the tube. This is because the area where the tube is installed, i.e. at either corner near an upper end thereof, is rounded which effectively prevents the tube from being crimped in place, since it is preferable to install the tube parallel to the longitudinal axis of the casket. If the tube were crimped in place on such a corner, the installed tube would be perpendicular to the tangent plane of the corner, and thus would not be parallel to the longitudinal axis of the casket. Therefore, in casket designs utilizing rounded corners the tubes have heretofore been required to be heat fused in place, with all the attendant disadvantages discussed above.
It would therefore be desirable to be able to crimp a tube to a rounded casket corner or to a casket shell panel including a rounded corner, rather than having to heat fuse the tube in place.
Accordingly, the present invention provides a method of making a sheet metal casket including attaching a tube to a rounded corner of the casket shell by crimping, and a casket made according to that method.